From 50,000-year-old cave dwellers to 21st-century graffiti artists, murals have given humans a way to express their world for centuries.
Closer to home, this popular art form has found its way on all sorts of exterior walls including garages, sheds and fences.
Morinville visual artist Robert Murray is one the latest to dive into this populist art form. His fence landscapes, mountainscapes and seascapes may not decorate great halls, however, they create a serene, relaxing environment for the homeowner.
Murray turns an ordinary wall into an extraordinary scene. His nature-based garden art runs the gamut, from a tree grove surrounding a cool pond or a ship sailing on orange waters during a setting sun, to water mills turning alongside rushing rivers or a lighthouse on a cliff waiting for the tide to rise.
“When I first posted my fence work on St. Albert Chat, my Facebook page lit up with inquiries. With people staying home because of COVID, I’ve already completed 65 since April,” said Murray.
Originally from Nova Scotia, he showed an aptitude for drawing at an early age. After high school, Murray travelled to Red Deer College where he graduated from a two-year art and design program.
“It covered a broad spectrum of art. My first intention was to be an art teacher to young children.”
However, as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Murray was called to serve as a missionary in England. Across the pond, he discovered the French impressionists. In particular, Édouard Manet and Claude Monet art had a profound influence on the young Canadian.
“The impressionists immediately struck a chord, and I was trying to use their technique. I admired their skill, the loose compositions and the romance in the paintings.”
Upon returning to Alberta, he met his wife Judy. They were married shortly after and had five children, all gifted with artistic talent.
Raising a family required different commitments. Murray pivoted to sales for 42 years, selling life insurance first and then industrial materials to oil and gas companies.
In the 1990s, his creative juices started flowing once more as he published three books, and for a time, sketched a weekly cartoon strip. He also designed a series of t-shirts as well as painted detailed landscapes on rocks and stones later sold at the St. Albert Farmers’ Market.
“I really honed my palette of colour and light and shadow in painting rocks.”
Through a series of circumstances, Murray inadvertently began mural painting after his mother was admitted to a seniors centre.
“I went to visit her and one day I was staring at a bare wall. I asked permission if I could paint a mural. It was an organic fantasy in the Kincaid style with flowers, trees and leaves.”
The administration loved his concept and commissioned two more works. To date, the prolific muralist has completed 500 pieces.
From painting three-pound rocks to finding himself on a hydraulic lift painting images more than three stories high, Murray has developed a style that incorporates impressionism’s romantic vibe.
“When I get a brush in my hand, I’m lost in my world and I love it. It’s a wonderful thrill. For me, it’s therapeutic.”
Murray works with speed and agility completing as many as two fence art pieces a day. In between painting garden art, he’s also been commissioned to create 13 indoor murals for Alberta hospitals.
“My plan is to make the murals a place of tranquility and peace that helps them (patients) reflect on the things that bring them happiness.”
As for the backyard fence art, he said, “With COVID-19 going the way it is, I want to leave people with a piece of heaven.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
